Warning: Icecrown spoilers!
As soon as I saw information on this fight, I got really excited: a fight where healers get to pose as DPS? So cool! New and exciting! Eeee!
Closer examination, however, leaves me a little disappointed. It’s no secret that the developers believe (rightly, in my opinion) that healing specs can be more different and niched because there are fewer of them, and healing as a reactive art means it isn’t subject to the strict rotation/maximized output of DPS classes at all times. This fight kind of turns that on its head, and suddenly it’s becoming very obvious that some healers are going to outperform others in the HPS race, as it were.
As a disc priest, I immediately voiced concern for this and basically have met the following response: “Oh, well someone has to take care of the real people! You’ll bubble-spam the raid.”
Sure, sure. That sounds good and all when you’re not super excited for this new mechanic, I guess? But this put me back in a dps mentality. Think of it this way: I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to say that a dps would get annoyed if on every fight they showed low on the meters for whatever hidden reason, then got a totally different fight that catered to high dps, and got stuck on adds for every single attempt because they knew their dps wasn’t high enough to help. They get sat out for not being able to pump out the numbers the guild needs. Eh? I don’t know. I’m a bit twitchy over it, and considering I’m in a 10 man guild I’ll probably have to go holy for this fight or something.
Ew. 
Perhaps I’m overreacting, but there are complaints from lots of people over the large theoretical discrepancy between healers, and the fight seems rather exploitable (one of the more interesting, and I hope prohibited, ideas is having pallies chain LoH).
What would’ve been really neat is if you were actively healing against adds beating on her (someone correct me if you DO, but from what I’ve seen it doesn’t look that way) because then my bubbles would definitely count for a lot, since the healers wouldn’t have to make up for as much HP lost during the fight.
Thoughts?
Hm. Seems interesting. I won’t say I was *waiting* for this fight, but it does sound pretty intense.
having a disc priest alt myself, I would have the same concerns [and my disc priest has no offspec, nor do I have intentions of adding one].
The mechanic sounds interesting, but it also sounds like it’ll just make life more hairy for the healers… Rather than just splitting attention between the tanks and dps, it adds the boss and you know dps will be pulling off targets off the tanks, so eh… just sounds very complicated to me.
At least it’s not actively tanking like Razuvious on 25 man. That fight is a major pain because you’re essentially asking healers and/or dps to tank, and unless they know the tanking mindset, it can be difficult for some of them.